Lives in Ruins

by Marilyn Johnson

  What could be better, except possibly waking up 200,000 years ago in Africa? If you were one of those creatures, Homo heidelbergensis or Homo erectus, “You know what your biggest problem would be?” Shea asked. “Getting to the ground alive. Because you probably had to sleep in a tree. Why did you have to sleep in a tree? Cuz there are at least five different kinds of carnivores living in your neighborhood and they all hunt at night. They can see at night, they can smell for kilometers, and guess what, you’re on their menu.” A grin lit up his wolfish face at the challenge of outwitting his stalkers. He’d be fine. I’d be meat. And you?

  But never mind the carnivores. Could he help explain the archaeology of ancient humans? I had been lost in a thicket of Homo this and Homo that—the subfield called paleoanthropology—and who better a guide than someone who helped find some of the oldest evidence of Homo sapiens? I asked Shea if I could sit in on one of his classes, and he promptly made space for me in the Archaeology of Human Origins. I didn’t tell him I had never quite managed scientific detachment. In high school biology class, when I went to dissect my anaesthesized frog, it pulled up the pins in its legs and jumped free.

  Twice a week, over a winter and spring, I took John Shea’s class, a virtual tour of significant archaeology sites around the world. Shea wanted to teach his students to think like archaeologists, so we looked at what the professionals uncovered, and tried to make sense of the fragments—tools, art, buildings, and burials. I was rewarded with hours of enlightenment, delivered in Shea’s irreverent, almost gonzo patter. Did you know our proto-human ancestors had brain cases big enough to hold two beers, whereas ours are big enough to contain the contents of a six-pack? I began to grasp how tiny and fragmented and bewildering these bits of archaeological knowledge were in the vast expanse of time.

  I started to absorb the language of archaeology, and began to call the humans that once roamed Europe, barrel-chest out-thrust, stone tools at the ready, Neandertals. My husband thought I sounded pretentious. “Don’t you think somebody who teaches paleoanthropology would know the right pronunciation?” I said. I pointed out that a recent documentary on PBS, or National Geographic—one of the channels without space aliens—featured an announcer, obviously a civilian, who called them Neanderthals, and a parade of archaeologists who carefully said Neandertals. I threw in with the archaeologists and leaned hard on the last syllable like a badge of defiance.*

  Along with a sprinkling of anthropology graduate students who also audited Shea’s course, I joined fifty or sixty undergraduates in a classroom from the previous century with a chalkboard and projection screen and teacher’s desk up front. Through the long windows we could hear construction vehicles beeping as the university raced to build more and sleeker classrooms. The grad students were grunges, without vanity except for their glorious high-top sneakers, purple, orange, even turquoise. They planned to drive to an archaeology conference in Memphis in mid-semester, with roadside stops in Tennessee to harvest flint for their flintknapping. They were excited to check out a bar in Memphis that had a live goat tethered to its balcony. For them, the goat was not just a gimmick with the whiff of a fraternity prank; they had lots of experience with goats. They had studied goats in the history of domestication, eaten goat in the Middle East, observed herds of goats around the world, identified goat bones and teeth in their digs. Goats would play a small but key role in our class, as Shea announced, to the grad students’ delight, that the Anthropology Society would once again host the Annual Spring Goat Roast. He would show us how to make our own stone tools, which we would then use to butcher a goat. It would be, he assured us, “the social event of the spring.” The goat would already be dead, a whole carcass from a nearby meat purveyor, but I couldn’t help remembering that frog that came back to life when I gave it a timid poke of the blade.

  JOHN SHEA HAD an unorthodox idea for organizing his class in the Archaeology of Human Origins. After twenty years of teaching the conventional narrative, beginning with the earliest variations of humans and moving through time toward the present, he had decided to reverse direction. The narrative form has been around for five thousand years, and “it’s a behavioral universal among the people of Homo sapiens,” Shea said, but he considered it a flawed structure for a science class. “Narratives close off the complexity of reality,” he declared. “You’re rooting your story of human origins amongst the data about which you know the least. If you make a mistake identifying the ancestor, or identifying the cause that pushed them out of the trees, or identifying whether it was tool use or bipedalism or some other factor that led them to be successful, that mistake early on in the narrative means that every single thing you inject into that narrative is wrong.” He framed the same thought for those of us who would have been eaten by lions in earlier times: “This class is like going back in a time machine. Hot-tub time machine, only without the hot tub, and without the embarrassing memories of the 1970s.”

  To start, he chose a dozen or so archaeological sites out of the thousands or even tens of thousands that date back to about 6,000–8,000 years ago, then ranged through the Middle East, Europe, China, Indonesia, and North and South Africa, before ending up at the few available ancient sites in East Africa where apes and apelike humans lived. (The Americas are of less interest to paleoanthropologists; they’re too young—there’s little verified evidence of humans on these continents until about 13,000 or 14,000 years ago,* and as Shea said, “I don’t even start paying attention until twelve thousand years ago.”) Before we went on our imaginary journey, though, we had to absorb several scientific principles, especially one that archaeologists borrowed from geology, uniformitarianism: In explaining the past, we use only those processes we can observe in the present. “This takes fairly pernicious ideas off the table, like ancient alien stuff,” Shea explained. “Has anyone noticed aliens coming down today and giving us advice on buildings? ‘O space lords! Thank you’? No!”

  Shea also wanted us to separate our observations from our interpretation, as good scientists do. He set a water glass on the desk and asked us to describe it. Half full? Half empty? Either involved a judgment and colored our description. A good scientist would describe it simply as a half glass of water. Alert for inadvertent bias in description, we also had to remember that some artifacts of culture simply don’t show up in the archaeological record. “If an ancient hominin [human] butchers a goat, and makes several canoes, and a guitar, ultimately there will be no remains of the wooden efforts. After a few ice ages, it’s a goat butchery site.” Why are paleoarchaeologists obsessed with flint? Because that is what survives.

  Another important lesson: Shea wanted to disabuse us of the notion that everything in the world could be divided in two. The convention that there were two sides to every story eliminated the third and fourth and fifth sides. Even dividing the past two and a half million years into the “Neolithic” (the new stone age) and the “Paleolithic” (the old stone age) was reductionist. “Write this down,” he said. “Dichotomies are for idiots.” Throughout the winter and spring, he threw it out there at odd moments, “Who are dichotomies for?” and back come their young, strong voices, like Neandertals preparing to ambush a mammoth: “IDIOTS!”

  WE STARTED THE class in the Middle East, in the dense Neolithic village of Jericho, also known as Tell es-Sultan. (A tell is a mound that grows gradually as successive generations live and build on it.) After many centuries, the people of Jericho found themselves living atop a mound seventy feet high. I am not exactly sure why someone would want to knock down an old mud-brick house and build on top of the debris instead of moving down the road, but the result is a boon for scientists who come along centuries later. Archaeologists love tells because they’re like layer cakes, with the trash of the pre-pottery people at the base, and deposits from more recent people, including their pottery and gnawed animal bones, near the top.

  As I sat in an uncomfortable molded seat, watching the professor draw little figures and diagrams with cha
lk, I meditated on how much of archaeology involved graves and garbage. Even from the distance of eighty centuries, I could smell the rot. Archaeologists opening the jaws of those early, hardworking farmers found “lots of periodontal diseases,” Shea told us. “These guys were shorter, squatter, and sicklier than us. They probably have only half their teeth, if that.” Teeth are gold mines for archaeologists, “like fossils in your mouth,” one archaeologist told me; and burials—well, we would be crawling into a few on this journey. The people of Jericho kept their dead close, under their living areas, and buried their children as well. Hunter-gatherers of even a few thousand years ago threw the bodies of their dead infants in the trash.

  Painted, decorated human skulls were found at Jericho, along with stone bowls, obsidian, and cowrie shells originating from distant places; and there really was a wall around it, and a tower, too. But Shea, naturally, bored in on the lithics, the stone weapons. A few different kinds of points were found in Jericho: tiny stone arrowheads, long ones with many notches that did terrible damage to their prey, but also “ginormous arrowheads, super-sized, and almost guaranteed to break when they slam into something,” Shea said. “Maybe these were designed to cripple the target—but you don’t want to wound an animal that then runs away. When would crippling be preferable to killing?” I looked around at the blank faces on my classmates. We were people who bought our hamburger already ground, if not cooked, and were clearly at a disadvantage in this game. “Any military veterans here?” he asked. “How about shooting to wound or maim, as in combat? Shoot to kill, you take out one person. Shoot to wound, you take three people out of the fight. These weren’t weapons for hunting, they were weapons for war.”

  Shea dialed back the time machine 25,000 years to the Upper Paleolithic, when people started spending huge amounts of time crafting tools and making art, and told us about the exotic site of Dolní Věstonice in what is now the Czech Republic. Mammoth bones littered the site and framed the round dwellings built on stone foundations. The people of Dolní Věstonice loved their mammoth bones, which they burned for fuel (imagine the stink!). They also carved stout little figures out of ivory and other materials, giving them small heads, big breasts and hips, a slit for the vulva, and stylized feet. This was not unusual; such “Venus figures” have been found from one end of Europe to the other. What was unusual about Dolní Věstonice was its pottery, which was made, not into vessels for food or drink, but into statues of animals. These earliest potters also made round balls of clay spiked with copper oxides and salts. Heating the animal figures made them durable; heating the balls made them explode in colored flames, like ancient firecrackers.

  The burials were the oddest part of this odd site. Most striking was what Shea told us about three young bodies, arranged so deliberately that I couldn’t help but think that those who buried them were trying to tell us a story. Shea described the scene: on the left, a male skeleton in his early twenties, his skull covered in powdered red ochre, rests one of his hands on the pelvis of the middle figure, apparently female. The figure in the center has a crippled back and is slightly curved toward another male on the right; their arms are interlocked, and both of their heads, too, are covered in red ochre. A soap opera, a love triangle, an ancient version of Romeo and Juliet? Mostly, it was a mystery, in meaning and in the details. Take the ochre. We can guess why ochre made great chalk for pictures or body paint, but why would people be buried with it? Yet both Homo sapiens humans and Neandertals buried their dead with such mineral pigments. Who knows why? Who knows why Venus figures appear across Europe? Who knows why big piles of hand-axes are found littered throughout Africa, Europe, and Asia? That’s a phrase that should crop up in every archaeological paper: Who knows why?

  Archaeologists live with mystery. Teasing open a site and studying it from all angles not only doesn’t answer all our questions, it mainly leads to more questions. So we study archaeology to gather authentic fragments of our human past, but the further back we go, the more we see what an incomplete picture we have of human history.

  There was another odd burial at Dolní Věstonice, this one of an older woman. She was found in a fetal position under the shoulder blades of a mammoth, near a fox skeleton, and scientists said her facial bones indicated paralysis on the left side of her face. Also found nearby at Dolní Věstonice: a carved ivory head and an ivory plaque with an incised face, and get this—both had faces that droop on the left. The carved head was the size of a thumb, and “that ivory would have taken dozens of hours to carve,” Shea said with respect. That woman was somebody.

  The people of Dolní Věstonice might seem cryptic and strange, but reaching back twice as far, to the Middle Paleolithic’s Neandertals and then even further by hundreds of thousands of years, first to Homo heidelbergensis and then to Homo erectus, was like watching a badly damaged, flickering black-and-white time travelogue. Neandertals ranged across Europe and the eastern Mediterranean (the Levant) into Russia, and lived in caves. Did they live in other dwellings, too? We know only about the ones preserved in caves. For a time, Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens both inhabited the Levant; then, for a significant period between 80,000 and 50,000 years ago, Homo sapiens disappeared from the archaeological record in this area. Again, who knows why?

  Did Neandertals and Homo sapiens reproduce with each other? This is the hot question ever since a laboratory sequenced the Neandertal genome in 2010 and scientists announced that a small percentage of Eurasian DNA could be traced to Neandertals. The results percolated down to the popular press—“It’s Fred, Wilma—And You!” and “Who’re You Calling a Neanderthal?” As with most paleoanthropological news, though, the conclusion was soon challenged. Do humans carry traces of Neandertal genes because they interbred or because they shared a common ancestor? Evolutionary genetics “is a young science,” Shea noted. “They only got Neandertal DNA in 1996. The jury’s still out.” To an archaeologist, that’s like yesterday. The laboratory at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, which sequenced the genome,* has a stellar reputation, Shea acknowledged, but his experience with laboratories overall is not reassuring: “All you have to do is look sideways at a sample to contaminate it.” From an archaeological perspective, “There is no clear and convincing proof that either hominin set eyes on the other.” You never find these people’s tools or bones in the same place at the same time. He refers to Neandertals as “our cousins” and conceded, “At most, the Neandertals are ancestral only to some of us.” He attributed part of the fascination with the species to the fact that their remains are easy to find and there are lots of specimens, and also to European scientists’ traditional preference for excavating in their own backyard, within easy reach of wine, cheese, and pâté.

  WHAT REALLY INTERESTED Shea were the tools, and there were places, like the caves he helped excavate in Israel, where there was evidence that Homo sapiens had used the same kinds of knives and tools as Neandertals. “The complex projectile weapons seem to be uniquely Homo sapiens, though,” he said. “Neandertals don’t seem to have used them.”

  Through Shea’s vivid descriptions, I finally learned to distinguish a few of the tangled branches of the human tree. Homo sapiens who lived in caves put trash in front and slept in the back; not so in the caves occupied by Homo heidelbergensis. Those humans, probably the last common ancestor of Homo sapiens and neanderthalensis, lived like frat boys 700,000 to 300,000 years ago, “flinging shit everywhere”—and the idea of slovenly boy and girl ancestors fascinated me. “Big heavy stone tools . . . probably solved things with brute force. Commandos without too much thought,” Shea riffed. “If you were going to cast Jersey Shore, you’d go with heidelbergensis.”

  The even more ancient Homo erectus, the tall thin guys who ran down their prey like wolves, began in Africa between a million and two million years ago. Most Homo erectus fossils, creepily, are missing part of the skull. Were they eaten? I think of the comic Louis C.K., another guy with a somewhat Neandertal build, w
ho reminds us that we don’t have to worry about being hunted and eaten on our way to work every day. “We got out of the food chain!” he crows. “That is a massive upgrade.”

  And then there was Homo floresiensis. The three-foot-tall hobbits are a twenty-first-century discovery from Indonesia and lived on the island of Flores, apparently until about 18,000 years ago. “You want to make a name for yourself? Learn the language of Indonesia, get a permit, and start digging holes there,” Shea advised.

  As for variations of our even-more-ancient ancestors, the proto-humans Paranthropus and Australopithecus, genera that appeared two to four million years ago in Africa, they had outsized teeth, the better to eat masses of vegetation. “The first thing you’d hear as you approached them is farting,” Shea said. There, now—we won’t ever confuse them with Homo erectus, let alone Homo sapiens.

  It was Shea’s idea that I should sit and take the exam for the Archaeology of Human Origins with the undergraduates. In spite of my crush on Homo heidelbergensis and newfound comfort with various extinct species of humans, I was horrified. I thought that was half the point, the point, of auditing—that I wouldn’t have to write a paper or take a test. “No, it’ll be good for you, it will focus your mind,” Shea said. “Just see how you do.” It must have occurred to him as I eased out of the classroom that my pallor and anxiety might have something to do with my age. “How long has it been since you took a science test?” he asked. Let’s see, tenth-grade biology—forty-two years? He was impressed.